Once I was walking through the market with one of our country’s millionaires, and I was astonished to watch her trying to haggle a date vendor down from twenty shekels to eighteen. She could have bought the entire market — but she argued with him over two shekels. That incident got me thinking that maybe this stinginess is precisely why she is so rich (in my case such a negotiation would have ended at twenty-five shekels). Today I understand that stinginess is a trait found in every human being — it just expresses itself in a different mutation in each of us.
I have a friend in the high, frozen mountains of the Galilee who spares no expense on good food and luxury flights, but if you visit his home you will turn into a snowman. Heating is a waste of money, he tells me. Put on a coat and socks.
There is no rationality in stinginess.
My grandmother would buy luxury jewelry for thousands of shekels at Stern and clean out half a bread bakery on Hahashmonaim Street, but her fridge always held half a tomato from the week before, because heaven forbid you should throw anything away. My father and teacher spoils us with expensive gifts, but if anyone forgets a light on in a room for five minutes, they are treated to a fifteen-minute lecture on saving electricity. I have a friend who is willing to add twenty minutes to his drive just to find a station where the gas is a few agorot cheaper.
With me, it’s canola oil. Sometimes we run out of canola oil at home, and then, heaven forbid, the kids might end up making an omelet with olive oil. Do you get it?! An omelet. With. Olive. Oil! It drives me out of my mind. So there is no supermarket run from which I do not return with a three-pack of canola oil. It drives Neta crazy. But the dread of the terrible waste of frying in olive oil overwhelms me.
Neta herself is close to perfection, except for her chronic container-hoarding disease, whose symptom is the amassing of boxes as countless as the sand upon the seashore. Our cupboards hold Gerber jars from our eldest’s weaning (he has already had his bar mitzvah), empty ice cream tubs from Maayani’s brit (fifth grade now), and empty snack-nut plastics from Carmush’s baby-naming celebration (she has already finished Harry Potter). What are all these containers for?! I ask Neta in despair as she stows away yet more empty olive jars in the last cupboard still left in our tiny home. “One day I will make a huge pot of plum jam, and I will need loads of jars.” She made her last jam in late 2009. We don’t even like plums. Every so often, when we go out for a picnic, she pulls out one of the thousands of containers, fills it with cut vegetables, and shoots me a triumphant look: See! Good thing I kept them.
I used to tear out the hairs of my beard. But today I understand that of all the defective traits of Homo sapiens, stinginess has a special charm. It manifests itself in a thousand and one utterly insane ways that open a window onto our beautiful, wonderfully flawed soul.
